iFixit present: The Galaxy S III Teardown

The Samsung Galaxy S III was supposed to land in our hands today, but shipping delays can affect the best of us.

Thankfully, our Canadian heroes at Chipworks came to the rescue and offered to provide us lovely disassembly photos of the Galaxy S III in their possession. We're not going to give it a Repairability Score because we don't feel it's right to judge a device through the intertubes. We're getting a unit of our own, so we'll update the teardown with a score once we have it in hand.

Highlights:

The main 8MP camera sensor is a Sony BSI unit, essentially the same camera found in the iPhone 4S. Folks can finally compare Apples to Androids when it comes to picture quality.

The back camera, at 1.9MP, should vastly outperform the VGA unit on the iPhone 4S.

Samsung's inscription on the battery reads "Please refer to manual before using battery." Yeah, like that's gonna happen...

The 3.8 V, 2100 mAh battery incorporates the Near Field Communications (NFC) module used in "S Beam" -- just like the Galaxy Nexus we took apart last year.

That 2100 mAh is ginormous when compared to the iPhone 4S' 1420 mAh and Galaxy Nexus' 1750 mAh units.

The glass is fused to the display, and the display to the Galaxy S III's frame. This will greatly increase the amount of money one has to spend when replacing the glass, should one be unfortunate enough to break it.

This is one of the first phones utilizing Corning Gorilla Glass 2, which according to Corning "enables up to a 20 percent reduction in glass thickness, while maintaining the industry-leading damage resistance, toughness, and scratch resistance." Interestingly, Corning only claims reduced thickness, not better damage resistance. While a 20% reduction in thickness is impressive, we'd like to see more effort towards creating robust and long-lasting devices.

A 13" MacBook Pro's display resolution is 1280x800. This phone has a 1280x720 resolution 4.8" display!

Chipworks eagerly provided us with pictures of the motherboard less than an hour into the teardown! Here's what they found: